What is an AI color palette? 

‍Color is one of the most strategic elements in professional design. When used well, color creates emotional connection, enhances user experience, strengthens brand identity and adds visual harmony to designs. Color palettes are curated collections of colors used consistently across a project. But selecting colors for your color palette and applying them consistently across all your design assets can be extremely time-consuming.AI color palettes and AI-powered color palette generators are rapidly revolutionizing this process for designers. AI not only helps you expand your creative horizons as a designer – it also lets you quickly generate on-brand color schemes, apply color palettes to multiple visuals at once and maintain consistency across large-scale projects.

This guide dives into the fundamentals of AI color palettes and how they are transforming the way professional designers work.
AI color palette generators can do all the following and more for you as a professional designer:

• Help you work more creatively with color 
• Improve and accelerate your end-to-end design workflow 
• Uplevel your professional design craft 
• Keep your design business ahead of the curve 

The basics of color theory

To understand how AI color palettes work, it's helpful to know the basics of color theory. Designers rely on color theory to create harmony or contrast. Colors are often selected based on their relationships on the color wheel – such as complementary or analogous colors.

Colors and color combinations
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Primary colors (red, yellow, blue) are combined to create secondary (green, orange, purple) and tertiary colors. Palettes are often based on specific color schemes, such as:

• Analogous: Colors next to each other on the color wheel
• Complementary: Opposites on the wheel, which provide strong contrast
• Monochromatic: Variations of a single color

AI tools are trained with specific knowledge of color theory. This means you don’t even have to dive into color theory to get your color combinations right. An AI color palette generator can analyze an image or visual asset and suggest complementary or analogous colors. What used to take an hour or more now takes seconds.

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AI-enhanced color selection
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With AI color palette tools you can now just upload an image, logo or visual inspiration and the AI color palette tool will suggest the best complementary or analogous colors to use. For example, if you upload an image of a beach scene, an AI tool can generate a palette based on the sky’s blues, the sand’s warm tones and the ocean’s calming greens.

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Warm vs. cool colors in branding
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As a professional designer, selecting the right color scheme is crucial to your ability to visually represent your clients’ brands. Warm colors (reds, oranges, yellows) evoke energy and warmth, while cooler colors (blues, greens, purples) convey calm and trust. AI image generators understand what “warm colors” are, so you can type that into your prompt, rather than having to select specific colors.

‍AI color palettes that express moods or styles
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‍Need to create a set of illustrations in specific colors to express a specific brand identity? You can type “futuristic, modern color palette” or “cute, pastel color palette” as part of your text prompt and let AI propose color schemes you might not have considered.

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How do AI color palettes generators improve design work? ‍

Color palettes ensure that all visual elements – from websites to social media graphics – feel cohesive and convey the right emotion and brand message. How does using AI color palette generators help you work better as a professional designer?

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AI-generated color palettes help you work better, faster and more creatively as a designer. You can do things like:
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1. Create color harmony automatically: AI color tools instantly generate color palettes based on established design principles like complementary or analogous colors, saving designers time from manually selecting harmonized colors and ensuring visual cohesion in seconds.
   
2. Iterate and invent much faster: AI quickly analyzes images, logos or project themes to suggest inventive palettes, allowing you to rapidly experiment with different color schemes without the need for lengthy trial-and-error processes.
   
3. Extract a palette from images: AI color palette generators can create stylized palettes from existing assets. For instance, if you upload an image of product packaging, the AI can generate a consistent color scheme you can then apply across a website, social media images and email marketing visuals.
   
4. Enhance your creativity: By generating unexpected or trend-driven color combinations, AI tools push designers out of their comfort zones, offering fresh ideas and helping them explore more creative, bold choices they might not have considered on their own.
5. Be a design trailblazer: AI color palette generators can rapidly analyze images of design trends to propose you the most on-trend color schemes for your projects. They keep you way ahead of the pack.
   
   

Design projects that are ideal for AI color palette generators

AI color palette generators are versatile and can be used across various design scenarios. Here are some common examples of designs tasks that get a big leg up from AI color palette generation:

• Web design: Use AI to generate color palettes that complement the visual structure and mood of your website, ensuring your UI elements are consistent and aligned with the brand.
• Social media assets: Whether you’re creating Instagram stories, Facebook ads, or LinkedIn banners, AI color palette tools allow you to maintain consistency across all platforms, ensuring that your brand identity is easily recognizable.
• Logos and branding: When creating logos or brand guidelines, AI can generate a professional palette that matches your vision, or even extract one from existing elements, like a product image or the logo itself.
• Digital campaigns: When managing large-scale campaigns with multiple design assets, AI ensures that every asset follows the same color direction, even when working with multiple designers or teams.

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How to create images with an AI color palette generator

AI-powered color palette generators don’t just suggest colors – they help you apply them across visuals in a few clicks. Here’s it typically works:

1. Open a project and select an image type

Raster images are best for web graphics or social media, vectors are better for logos or scalable assets. Some tools, like Recraft, let you create vector images in addition to raster images. Recfaft also has a vectorizer that lets you turn PNGs and JPEGs into SVG vector files. 

2. Select the AI color palette tool and create or import a palette

• Import from an image: Upload an image and let the AI tool extract a palette based on the dominant colors.
• Generate automatically: Need inspiration or not sure what you’re looking for in a palette? Use the AI color palette generator to create a color scheme based on keywords like "bold" or "calming."
• Enter specific hex codes: If you’re working within brand guidelines or have specific colors you love, enter your predetermined hex codes to create a precise palette.

3. Generate an AI image based on your palette

Enter a prompt for the AI image generator, using as much detail as possible. You can even describe how you want your color palette to be used. For example, "Generate a modern workspace scene using a blue and green palette, with light blue (#ADD8E6) as the background and deep green (#006400) for accents."

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Also try Recraft's new Brand style customization feature, that allows users to upload reference images for the AI to generate branded content. The new style creation flow allows for fine-grained experimentation with style details to get exactly the style required for the brand's unique look and feel.

AI color palettes are more than just a time-saver – they are a creative partner, helping designers produce beautiful, on-brand visuals at scale. Whether you specialize in websites, social media art or brand work for businesses, 

Color palette generators make it faster and easier for you to explore fresh color combinations, find the right colors and maintain color consistency across the assets you create.
Sign up at recraft.ai and start turbocharging your design work with AI color palettes.